essay

The “digital divide” is a surprisingly durable concept. It has evolved through the years to describe a myriad of economic, social, and technical disparities at various scales across different socioeconomic demographics. Originally it described how people of lower socioeconomic status were unable to access digital networks as readily or easily as more privileged groups. This may have been true a decade ago, but that gap has gotten much smaller. Now authors are cooking up a “new digital divide” based on usage patterns. Forming and maintaining social networks and informal ties, an essential practices for those of limited means, is described as nothing more than shallow entertainment and a waste of time. The third kind of digital divide operates at a global scale; industrialized or “developed” nations have all the cool gadgets and the global south is devoid of all digital infrastructures (both social and technological). The artifacts of digital technology are not only absent, (so the myth goes) but the expertise necessary for fully utilizing these technologies is also nonexistent. Attempts at solving all three kinds of digital divides (especially the third one) usually take a deficit model approach.The deficit model assumes that there are “haves” and “have nots” of technology and expertise. The solution lies in directing more resources to the have nots, thereby remediating the digital disparity. While this is partially grounded in fact, and most attempts are very well-intended, the deficit model is largely wrong. Mobile phones (which are becoming more and more like mobile computers) have put the internet in the hands of millions of people who do not have access to a “full sized” computer. More importantly, computer science, new media literacy, and even the new aesthetic can be found throughout the world in contexts and arrangements that transcend or predate their western counterparts. Ghana is an excellent case study for challenging the common assumptions of technology’s relationship to culture (part 1) and problematizing the historical origins of computer science and the digital aesthetic (part 2). more...

A small symbol, but a big deal. Last weekend, Facebook Inc. updated its architecture to better represent users who marry same-sex partners. Until this point, a relationship status of “married” was ubiquitously accompanied by a cake-topper-like icon of a man and a woman.

Now, users can select a male-female, female-female, or male-male icon to digitally represent their matrimony. I want to take this occasion to briefly discuss what it means to construct a self via template, and question the extent to which the binds of templated identity construction are more (or less) severe than general practices of categorization. more...

This is a slight tonal change from what I normally write; given that it’s now topping a hundred degrees in the shade, this post is much more casually reflexive and much less overtly theoretical than usual.

People keep trying to add me on Facebook. This raises some interesting issues. Most of them have to do with the fact that I’m not on Facebook.

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Last week I delineated Schraube’s concept of technology as materialized action—or the notion that material objects are simultaneously imbued with human subjectivity while independently affecting human experience. I concluded by noting that this relationship between built-in agency and independent efficacy makes the object necessarily precarious—leading often to unimagined consequences.

With this precariousness in mind, I want to focus here on the body as technology, and specifically I want to focus on the body as a potentially politicized technology. I do so using the case of body size.

The body is simultaneously infused with human meaning and independent efficacy. The body is an object created out of human choices about (literal) consumption, adornment, and sculpture. At the same time, the body tells the person to ‘eat this, wear that, desire hir, move like this.’ The body then, as materialized action, is necessarily precarious. We cannot know what affect the relationship between the person and hir body will produce. Does a thin body reflect and affect fitness, or does it reflect and affect poor body image and restrictive self-control? Does a fat body reflect and affect indulgence, or does it reflect and affect acceptance and pleasure? more...

This is part one of a two-part post in which I delineate a language with which we can think about the body as technology, and in particular, politicized technology. We can do so, I argue, with Ernst Schraube’s conceptualization of technology as materialized action. In part one I lay out the theoretical framework of technology as materialized action. In part two, I apply this conceptualization to the body, and focus on the case of body size. more...

The problem is not just that all the humans have moved to Real Space. The Origami and Faberge digients have gone to Real Space too, and Ana can hardly blame their owners; she’d have done the same, given the opportunity. … There are vast expanses of minutely-detailed terrain to wander around in, but no one to talk to except for the tutors who come in to give lessons. There are dungeons without quests, malls without businesses, stadiums without sporting events; it’s the digital equivalent of a post-apocalyptic landscape.

— Ted Chiang, “The Lifecycle of Software Objects”

A few months back, I wrote a piece on the atemporal nature of abandoned/ruined physical spaces and the equally atemporal nature of our digital representations of those spaces. As it goes with a lot of posts on this blog, one of the central points of that piece — though it was essentially grounded in a consideration of physical space — was the enmeshed nature of the digital and the physical and how they have to be considered together if sense is going to be made of either.

As much as that piece considered the digital coupled with the physical, it didn’t do much to address the much trickier issue of abandoned digital space and what it can reveal about how we imagine time and history. That’s where I want to place my focus now.

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Last month in Part I (Distributed Agency and the Myth of Autonomy), I used the TtW2012 “Logging Off and Disconnection” panel as a starting point to consider whether it is possible to abstain completely from digital social technologies, and came to the conclusion that the answer is “no.” Rejecting digital social technologies can mean significant losses in social capital; depending on the expectations of the people closest to us, rejecting digital social technologies can mean seeming to reject our loved ones (or “liked ones”) as well. Even if we choose to take those risks, digital social technologies are non-optional systems; we can choose not to use them, but we cannot choose to live in a world where we are not affected by other people’s choices to use digital social technologies.

I used Facebook as an example to show that we are always connected to digital social technologies, whether we are connecting through them or not. Facebook (and other companies) collect what I call second-hand data, or data about people other those from whom the data is collected. This means that whether we leave digital traces is not a decision we can make autonomously, as our friends, acquaintances, and contacts also make these decisions for us. We cannot escape being connected to digital social technologies anymore than we can escape society itself.

This week, I examine two prevailing privacy discourses—one championed by journalists and bloggers, the other championed by digital technology companies—to show that, although our connections to digital social technology are out of our hands, we still conceptualize privacy as a matter of individual choice and control, as something individuals can ‘own’. Clinging to the myth of individual autonomy, however, leads us to think about privacy in ways that mask both structural inequality and larger issues of power. more...